The moment has almost arrived for Chelsea to prove they are a serious football club. Once this season ends, their decision on Mauricio Pochettino’s future as head coach will tell us whether club co-owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali have learned the lessons of their chaotic two years in charge or if they remain lost in their own version of fantasy football.
Pochettino is almost at the halfway stage of his two-year contract at Stamford Bridge, but the former Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint-Germain coach still has no idea whether he will be around to complete the full terms of his agreement.
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Just last week, Pochettino urged his Chelsea bosses to put a stop to the “stupid rumours” about his position after admitting the only updates he gets about his situation are from what he hears and reads in the media.
“If I have one more year on my contract here, and no one says nothing, suppose that I am going to be here,” Pochettino told a news conference. “We don’t know at the moment. I suppose I have one more year on my contract and that I am going to be here.”
Boehly and Eghbali could easily banish the doubts over Pochettino by giving an answer, one way or another, to the question of whether he will still be in charge of the team next season. But the ongoing uncertainty only points to a bigger question about what they actually want or expect as owners.
They probably expect much more from their £1 billion-plus investment in the playing squad than a late-season surge into contention for Europa League qualification. However, considering where Chelsea were when Pochettino arrived last summer, the team’s trajectory right now should be a pointer towards a brighter future.
This time last year, Chelsea were heading to a 12th-place finish in the Premier League, 27 points adrift of the top four, as Boehly and Eghbali’s disastrous first year as owners ended with Pochettino becoming their fourth manager in that short space of time. They fired Champions League-winning coach Thomas Tuchel less than a month into their first season at the helm, replacing him with Graham Potter. But the former Brighton & Hove Albion boss only lasted eight months in the job before he was sacked and former manager Frank Lampard returned to see out the final 11 games of the season.
And while last summer saw another bout of heavy spending (over £400 million) on some of the brightest young talent in the game — including Moisés Caicedo, Romeo Lavia, Christopher Nkunku and Cole Palmer — it also coincided with the exits of a group of experienced players including Kai Havertz, Mason Mount, Mateo Kovacic, N’Golo Kanté, César Azpilicueta, Christian Pulisic and Kalidou Koulibaly. Pochettino walked into a football club that resembled a washing machine on a top-speed cycle. The club was destabilised by new ownership, managerial churn and a policy, driven by the new owners, of replacing proven, experienced performers with youngsters yet to fulfil their potential.
Perhaps Pochettino misjudged the size of the task he faced. The 52-year-old has rarely looked happy in his role, with tentative progress often halted by a heavy defeat. He has also had to deal with an unhappy fan base that has, at times, protested against the new owners, called for the return of former manager José Mourinho and shown little obvious warmth towards Pochettino due to his previous association with bitter rivals Tottenham. But despite all of that, and long-term injuries to Lavia and Nkunku, Pochettino has guided Chelsea to the Carabao Cup final, the FA Cup semifinals, and could yet secure a top-six finish and qualification for Europe this season.
Momentum is an often-overlooked commodity in football, but compared to Ange Postecoglou at Spurs and Erik ten Hag at Manchester United, Pochettino and Chelsea are ending the season in much more convincing fashion. They have lost just once in their last 12 Premier League games — albeit a 5-0 humiliation at Arsenal last month — and have just secured some local pride with back-to-back wins against London rivals Spurs and West Ham United. With three games to go — against Nottingham Forest, Brighton and Bournemouth — Chelsea could yet end the season as high as fifth. Palmer, a £42.5m summer signing from Manchester City, has been one of the Premier League’s stars of the season with 21 goals and nine assists from 31 games.
So why are Boehly and Eghbali so reluctant to end the speculation over Pochettino’s future by making it clear that he will be in charge next season? Did they really expect more considering the mess that Pochettino walked into last summer?
When they hired Pochettino, he arrived with a reputation as a coach who works well with young players and is able to mould them into a formidable team, as he did at Spurs. But young teams are often compromised by inexperience and naivety, especially when they lack senior players around them. That glaring deficiency in the squad was caused by the owners’ chaotic recruitment rather than the choices of Pochettino, or coaches Lampard, Potter and Tuchel before him.
Considering the obstacles he has had to overcome, a top-six finish would be little short of a football miracle. Pochettino shouldn’t be wondering whether he will still be in a job once this campaign ends. If Boehly and Eghbali really expected more than Pochettino has delivered so far, the naivety that has cost Chelsea on the pitch this season is clearly also a big problem in the boardroom.